Now take a halfpenny [or an American quarter,] place it on the table close to the thread, so that the eye end of the thread is ten feet away; and then push the halfpenny gently forward, till it has displaced the thread the barely perceptible amount of one thousandth of an inch. The eye looking along the thread will now see that the ray is no longer absolutely straight; in other words, the star whose apparent position is determined by that ray will appear slightly shifted. The scale is fixed by the size of the halfpenny, whose diameter, one inch, is used to represent the Sun’s diameter of 800,000 miles. The ten-foot distance between eye and Sun practically supposes that the eye is on the Earth, which would be a spot one hundredth of an inch in diameter, or about the size of this full stop. As for the distance of the star, at the other far end of the thread, that does not matter in the least: but, on this scale, it may be interesting to note that one of the nearest stars, about eight light-years away, would require the thread to be a thousand miles long. The ray is now bent or deflected as it passes the neighborhood of the Sun on its long journey, so that it is out of place one thousandth of an inch at a distance of ten feet; and the effect of this tilt of the ray, upon the observer, is to make him just able to see a star upon the Sun’s ‘limb’ when it is really behind it, or to make him see a star slightly further off the ‘limb’ or rim of the Sun than it really is. The shift of one thousandth of an inch at a distance of ten feet corresponds to an angle of one and three-quarter seconds of arc, which is just the optical shift that actually ought to occur, according to Einstein, when a ray from a star nearly grazes the Sun’s limb on its way to a telescope; and this is the optical shift which we now know does occur. That may be taken as the definite result of the recent eclipse observations. The effect, both in magnitude and direction, had been predicted four years before, on the strength of a mathematical investigation, by Professor Einstein. The images of two stars, one on each side of the sun’s disk, will apparently be crowded a little apart when the sun comes between them. A star that would be just eclipsed by the edge of the sun’s disk if its rays came straight may still be visible since the rays are curved. In other words we can “see around a corner” as every good teacher is said to do. If the sun were encircled by a ring of stars, or a nebula, like a halo, the circle of light would be contracted as it passed the sun and would come to a focus at a place seventeen times the distance of Neptune, or 47,600,000,000 miles beyond the sun.